IBM Quantum Challenge: Exceeded 1 Billion Circuits a Day

(IBM.Blogs) IBM invited people from around the world to participate in the IBM Quantum Challenge May 4-May 8 on the IBM Cloud. We devised the Challenge as a global event to celebrate our fourth anniversary of having a real quantum computer on the cloud.
Over those four days 1,745 people from 45 countries came together to solve four problems ranging from introductory topics in quantum computing, to understanding how to mitigate noise in a real system, to learning about historic work in quantum cryptography, to seeing how close they could come to the best optimization result for a quantum circuit. This last one was tough, but 574 people completed all four exercises correctly.
Who took part? Among the problem solvers were students, technologists, teachers, professors, lawyers, software engineers, consultants, interns, data scientists, AI engineers, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, and … well, the list goes on and on. Those working in the Challenge joined all those who regularly make use of the 18 quantum computing systems that IBM has on the cloud, including the 10 open systems and the advanced machines available within the IBM Q Network.
During the 96 hours of the Challenge, the total use of the 18 IBM Quantum systems on the IBM Cloud exceeded 1 billion circuits a day. History was made — every day the cloud users of the IBM Quantum systems made and then extended what can absolutely be called a world record in computing.